February 08, 2008

you ain't from my hood, don't even rep Q.B.

Hundreds of members of an anti-Al-Qaeda front in Iraq's central city
of Baquba on Friday donned keffiyeh headdresses and took to the streets
demanding the police chief be sacked, witnesses said.

Fighters
ran militia-style through two neighbourhoods in the capital of Diyala
province, ordering shops to shut and people to stay indoors, prompting
police to declare a curfew, an AFP correspondent said.

The action
came after demands by the group earlier in the week that police chief
Major General Ghanim al-Quraishi be sacked were ignored.

"Despite
our efforts and the blood we shed in order to expel Al-Qaeda members
from Diyala, we received no help from the government or the police,"
said Haji Basim al-Karkhi, who is in charge of the "popular committees."

"The
police chief committed violations such as abducting Sunnis in front of
the Diyala police headquarters," said Karkhi. "He also does not accept
Sunni recruits."

UPDATE: ... a friend writes (I haven't seen any comfirming reporting yet, but he should know):

abul abed left town for jordan a couple of days ago. last night the
iraqi army arrested 18 men in amriya without being accompanied by abul
abed's men the way they're supposed to. they arrested men include 4 or
5 of abul abed's men. abul abed's men say if the army doesnt release
them then they will fight it. the streets of amriya are dead now.

... and insurgency-friendly news site reports armed clash between Awakening militia and Iraqi national forces in al-Adhamiya. The plural of anecdote isn't evidence, but it is plural...

Comments

Yeah, they're an armed state-within-a-state. But at least these are folks who can be negotiated with and have more reasonable demands than al-Douri marching triumphantly into Baghdad and a full restoration of the Ba'ath party.

I never did like the Parliamentary system suggested by the U.N. and accepted by the U.S. and said so at the time. Its winner-take-all-power-and-goodies approach encourages violence. Doubtless the solution is to revise the constitution: (1) make it a more federal system, and (2) make all Iraqi officials accountable under the law (since the gov't revived a Saddam-era law making ministers immune to prosecution for corruption.) Coalition forces - local commanders - can use the credibility and trust earned to advocate this, and perhaps gently suggest to Iraqis what kinds of questions they could be asking of their elected officials.

Damn, Mark. I saw the title of this post on Toot and I actually thought you had something good to say about something... anything... for a change. I guess I should know better by now.

Do you actually make a living doing this? Or do you just do it for fun? Do you speak sanity and have a positive message, in your professional life? I have trouble believing anyone with such a one-sided (and negative) world view can find employment in the field of "public diplomacy" - what the hell kind of diplomacy is that? It's propaganda, this stuff you do. Your position never changes, and you always predict the worst (for the US/West) possible outcome with your "analysis".

Re the Parliamentary system - the Iraqis eventually chose this system rather than a presidential one to avoid the risk of power being over-centralised in one party or person. This was because of the Shiite and Kurd experience under the minority totalitarian government of the Baath, which they were determined would not be repeated in Iraq. They chose the proportional representation electoral system for the same reason. Their system of government is very similar to that adopted by post-apartheid South Africa, which also had gone through multi decades of tyrannical rule imposed by a small minority regime.

The Iraqi constitution virtually ensures powersharing, compromise and consensus. It is the anthesis of "winner take all", which is why so many recent decisions have been able to be held up by the Parliament and re-negotiated.

Seems hard to argue "the Iraqis" chose anything. A small handful of exile politicians and local warlords cut deals with American occupiers that produced the dysfunctional mess we see today. Iraq under American occupation and in civil war versus post-Apartheid South Africa yields far too many differences to be a useful standard of comparison.

"A small handful of exile politicians and local warlords" seems to be a highly perjorative (and I must say Baath-centric) term for the members of the Iraqi Governing Council who painstakingly drafted, negotiated and approved the Transitional Law (see Rajiv Chandrasekaran's account in "Imperial Life in the Emerald City") not to mention the democratically elected government which put the final draft to the vote in October 2005, the nearly 10 million voters who faced an insurgency down to turn out and the nearly 80 percent of those 10mill who voted "yes"?

The South African model is significant, in that the Iraqis chose not to have a "winner take all system" but instead adopted a power sharing, consensus model as the South African 80 per cent majority blacks did. It's hard to imagine the SA blacks being so generous and far sighted had they been facing an Afrikaaner insurgency killing their civilians by the thousands?

Isn´t it a bit suspicious that the following day after the CLCs "withdrawal" from posts in Baquba, unspecified "gunmen" tore through various neighborhoods in the city killing ten people?So far no one has been arrested.

Craig and fellow travellors just won't recognize that operationally the Awakening Councils are simply the successors to the Sunni Insurgents we fought in Ramadi and Fallujah in 2004. After we went to full scale battle against them in an effort to demand they knuckle under to central governmental control and in the process largely destroying their major cities they allowed the formation of what became AQI on condition that it focus its attacks on Shi'ites, the central government and occupation troops. It is only when AQI turned on their Iraqi Sunni sponsors and tried to assert total control over their areas by such tactics as forced marriages to their daughters that the Sunni Insurgents in Anbar cut a deal with the US Marines there: largely turn over Anbar security to us (i.e. admit defeat) and we will turn on our former clients now contenders for power.

A similar dynamic happened in the south, we simply surrendered control to the people we had previously been fighting in Najaf and Samarrah, in both cases we cut deals with former enemies in the form of us asking them: "Stop attacking us, and start reining in your terrorist clients, and we will largely pull out our combat forces from areas under your control". Looking back we could have had pretty much this same deal by not attacking Ramadi, Fallujah, Najaf and Samarrah 3 and 4 years ago. That whirring sound is war supporters desperately trying to spin surrender on the ground into victory on the basis that the real victors aren't killing many of us anymore. No they don't have to, we are leaving their areas as alone as we possibly can while arming our former enemies and putting them on the payroll for $10 a day.

Who lost Iraq? The warmongers who continue to insist that if you squint just right and shove every past stated measure of victory down the Memory Hole and replace it with a metric of 'marginally and temporarily less combat deaths than when we were in all out urban combat' by gum you can still see that we are in post war conditions and due for a victory parade any FU now.

Seems hard to argue "the Iraqis" chose anything. A small handful of exile politicians and local warlords cut deals with American occupiers that produced the dysfunctional mess we see today. Iraq under American occupation and in civil war versus post-Apartheid South Africa yields far too many differences to be a useful standard of comparison.

Posted by: Non-Arab Arab | February 10, 2008 at 12:07 AM

Which is pretty much par for the course considering "the Iraq" is just an RAF coaling station cobbled together in the 1920s by Winston Churchill.

Forgive my naivete, but there seems to have been a massive climb-down in demands on the part of those Sunni insurgents who have joined the Awakening/Sons of Iraq/Whatever. Like I said in my first comment, demanding Iraqi soldiers not come into your neighborhood is a far, far cry from demanding that the Ba'ath Party be recognized as the sole legitimate ruler of all Iraq from Basra to Kirkuk.

Is there not some question whether any "massive climb-down in demands" has taken place?

Those who set up as Salvific Awakeners today are not, I believe, the same persons as demanded a restoration of the traditional Sunni Ascendancy -- whether in a Ba‘thí or a salafí form -- immediately after the aggression of March 2003. By their own account (as I have heard it), they merely went along with the likes of M. al-Dúrí or M. al-Zarqáwí, perhaps under threats and pressures, and did not take the lead themselves. For all I know to the contrary, the now Baní Sahwa may never have wanted anything more than to set up little independent city-states of their own.

Abú Aardvark might be able to tell us whether any unmistakable heirs of Saddám or avowed disciples of Bin Ládin have moderated their ambitions lately. They spend a lot of time and energy accusing one another of that and other betrayals, but are any of the accusations fact-based?